Small-Scale Peer-to-peer Publish/Subscribe

Abstract

The scalability of publish/subscribe (pub/sub) systems
and distributed hash tables (DHTs) have been extensively
studied in the literature. However, less well-known are
properties of the pub/sub model and DHTs that make them
suitable for small networks. This paper articulates these
benefits, and evaluates the performance of a DHT-based
pub/sub implementation in small-scale networks. We find
that a fundamental assumption of DHT-based data management
applications is violated in small networks, and this
makes the pub/sub implementation exhibit poor load balance
under certain workloads. This work illustrates that
data management applications that scale in large networks
may not scale in small networks.